


Half Of Everything Is Luck

by EllaStorm



Category: GoldenEye (1995), James Bond (Classic movies), James Bond (Movies)
Genre: Cemetery, Emotional Baggage, Enemies to Lovers, First Time, M/M, POV Alec, Post Goldeneye, Surviving Impossible Plunges, dumb luck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-13
Updated: 2018-11-13
Packaged: 2019-08-23 03:27:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16611017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllaStorm/pseuds/EllaStorm
Summary: Alec survives the end of his second life and goes on the hunt for Bond. Unfortunately, killing someone is always a little easier if you actually want them to die.





	Half Of Everything Is Luck

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SandraMorningstar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SandraMorningstar/gifts).



> There's a really geeky Samuel Beckett reference in here and I'm not even sorry.

The end of his life was a fireball hurtling towards him, a billow of steel, flames and ash, crushing, bursting, deafening, burying him.

And when the end of his life was over, Alec, under a pile of hot metal bars, was still breathing.

He pushed his luck and moved his feet.

It hurt.

It worked.

A laugh fell from his lips like a prayer, tell-tale pain of broken ribs in his left side, and the breath he sucked in tasted like gasoline, but he didn’t stop laughing until he ran out of air.

Dumb luck had never been his specialty.

Maybe he’d just been saving it all for now.

 

 

***

 

 

The doctor in the hospital went pale when she saw the CT-scans of his spine and skull and started shouting commands in Spanish whose exact meanings eluded Alec. There was a worrisome lot of Latin mixed into them, anyway.

Three pain-medicated days and two emergency operations later the nurse told him it was a miracle he was still alive, and an even bigger one that he could move all of his limbs.

 _Not a miracle,_ he told her, _just luck._

 _Someone was watching over you,_ she said, undeterred. _There is a reason you are still alive, hermoso. You should thank God._

But God was the furthest thing on Alec’s mind. He did agree with the whole talk about reason, though. There was a reason. He had been killed twice by the same man. And both times he had refused to die. It all made sense, if you looked at it like that.

The man twice-resurrected was destined to end the life of the one who failed to put him in his grave. Easy. Clear-cut.

No God needed.

 

 

***

 

 

Assuming a different identity wasn’t exactly new to Alec. He’d been over this plenty. Only this time there was no underground syndicate, no big plan. This time, it was just Bond and him. Alec found him in France in the space of four weeks; and then, easily, he found the perfect moment, the perfect position, the perfect sniper rifle.

When he watched Bond step out of the casino building into the late summer night of Saint Tropez, absentmindedly fixing his cufflinks and scanning his surroundings with a lazy twist of his head, a strange feeling befell him. He’d thought this was the right moment, the right way to do it, to end James Bond once and for all, a clean cut; but maybe he was wrong. This was _too_ clean. Way too clean. He’d pull the trigger, and Bond would silently fall, and nobody would ever know what had happened.

No. There had always been more to them, more than just an anonymous bullet to the head. It was elegant, sure, but Alec realized in that moment that he didn’t want it to be _elegant_. He wanted it to be brutal. To tear through 007’s perfect, untainted façade and watch him suffer.

A knife. An abandoned warehouse. That was more like it.

He took the finger off the trigger and watched James Bond walk away. They were in no hurry.

 

 

***

 

 

The abduction of a double-O, of course, took a little more planning than a simple shoot-to-kill. But the perfect moment came, one foggy morning in Dublin, where Bond was taking care of the remaining members of a crime family, and currently on his way from the hotel to the station, no pedestrians, no lights, no sight.

Well, at least it _would_ have been the perfect moment. You see, Alec wanted to savour it a little, to bask in the knowledge that he was going to abduct Bond, _James Bond,_ in a minute, imagined the look of surprise on his face, imagined the look of pain when he’d draw his knife through flesh and tear the man to pieces, slowly – but he savoured it a little too long, just a tiny bit, because suddenly he was pre-empted by gunfire, Bond crouching down behind a low wall, and a sudden fit of anger in his system he hadn’t been prepared for. He pulled his pistol and started firing at the bastards who were firing at Bond, because _dear God,_ how _dare_ they. In between the adrenaline-laden, fog-stained exchange of bullets he saw Bond’s head turn, confused, to where he was, and that prompted Alec to finally retract into the shadows and run.

In the end, his hands up against a moist brick wall, his sides hurting from breathing too hard, he couldn’t help but marvel at the odd sensation streaming through his veins: exhilaration, bordering on euphoria. He hadn’t quite felt like this since…since – well, since his last mission working with Bond. _For England._

Alec tried to muster up more of the old, well-worn anger that had drawn him here, that familiar appetite for destruction, Bond’s destruction; but he was only more confused when he couldn’t recover it in the same shape he remembered it.

 

 

***

 

 

That night Alec spent thinking, mostly, discontinued only by drinking alcohol and blankly staring at hotel room walls. There was a question, wildly twirling around his head, and that question was about as easy to answer as any question about the meaning of life or the existence of a higher being might be. Considering that his question, too, dealt with what Alec had been considering the meaning of his new life up to now, that wasn’t a surprise, though.

_Why haven’t I killed him yet?_

There were a billion possible excuses, and Alec had made them all, starting back in his second life, going right through to his third.

_Not the right moment._

_Not the right circumstances._

_Well, I’m really TRYING to kill him, he just won’t LET me._

He just now admitted to himself that these excuses were all pretty flimsy. He’d had Bond at gunpoint so many times, and he’d never pulled the trigger. He’d fought him, thrown him, punched him – and never broken his neck. It wasn’t like Alec was bad at his job (his track record showed otherwise, thank you very much). He was just bad at his job when it came to Bond. _And why is that?_

Alec took a deep sip of bourbon and stared at the wall for another extended period of time. He knew he wanted to kill Bond, he was absolutely, one-hundred percent sure of that. But…

_I want to kill him. I don’t want him to die._

What an unfortunate insight for a killer.

 

***

 

 

In the end, after tailing him to Paris, Alec sent Bond a letter.

 

_Half of everything is luck._

_Midnight. Montparnasse Cemetery._

_Wait with Beckett._

_You might just meet Godot._

 

He was early for the meeting, chose a spot a few headstones away from Samuel Beckett’s, and waited. Bond, of course, was late. When he did show, Alec could tell from his demeanour that he was nervous and on guard, his moonlight-engulfed silhouette pulled tight as a bowstring, his hand in the pocket of his suit jacket, gripping. A sweet, fast-paced wave of adrenaline shuddered through Alec’s body at the sight.

“You killed me,” he said; and Bond’s head shot around, followed shortly by the gun in his hand. “But I didn’t die.”

Alec stepped out of the shadows into the moonlight, and for a short moment he saw Bond’s hand tremble.

“How…?”

“Half of everything is luck, James. And the other half…”

“…is fate,” Bond murmured, like the words were dragged out of him. His blue eyes cleaved through the pale light with unmatched sharpness, brightly.

“I was on your heels, James. I could have killed you ten times between Saint Tropez, Dublin and here.”

Silence.

“Why didn’t you?”

“Every time you killed me, I wouldn’t die. Every time I wanted to kill you, you wouldn’t let me. Don’t you see what this is?”

Alec was stepping up to him now, until the stretched-out barrel of Bond’s gun was resting against the fabric of his coat. He wasn’t scared. Not remotely. The adrenaline was still coursing through him, though, and Alec kept trying to figure out what _that_ was all about.

“No,” James said, curtly, but Alec didn’t believe him.

“We’re dancing, James. One step forward, one step back. The synchronicity never went away.”

“And still we’re on opposite sides. My gun is pointing directly at your heart. Don’t believe I wouldn’t gladly kill you again.” James’ tone of voice might have fooled a lot of people, but Alec had spent so much time learning to read him like a book, that he could easily detect the slight wavering of his breath, the nervousness in his fingers, the indecisive twitch of his lashes.

Alec chuckled. “I’m on nobody’s side, James. Janus is dead. You killed him. You did the job. It’s no longer about _them._ ” He tilted his head to the side. “It’s not even about whether you want to kill me. It’s about whether you want me dead. Two completely different things.”

Bond hesitated for a long moment.

Then the pressure of the barrel disappeared from Alec’s chest.

“What do you want from me?” Bond asked. “Why am I here?”

“For the same reason I am here,” Alec gave back.

“And that would be?”

“I haven’t quite figured it out yet,” Alec conceded.

He realised, just then, that ever since Bond had stopped keeping him at arm’s length, the space between them had begun to diminish. They were closer to each other now, much closer.

“There must be a reason…” Bond started, and Alec laughed, because he didn’t know what else to do.

“They kept telling me that at the hospital. _There must be a reason you’re alive._ ”  
Bond just looked at him, and with the swift movements of someone trained to kill, Alec grabbed him and shoved him backwards, three steps, against the wall of a small mausoleum. That strange exhilaration he’d felt in Dublin had taken hold of him again; and mixed with Bond’s indelible closeness, the smell of his aftershave, the warmth of his breath, it made for a heady cocktail.

“So,” Bond said. One of his hands was grabbing onto the lapel of Alec’s coat with the same challenge that lay in his voice; and suddenly Alec knew why he was here.

His lips crashed down on Bond’s, came towards them like the metal inferno that had ended his second life, and it was good to feel him answer, push back. It was like fighting in a way, like dancing in another; not so different from anything else they’d done up to this point. Alec’s hands were gripping dark hair and his teeth found tendons and muscles under Bond’s skin when he kissed down his neck, drank him down like absinthe, the same bittersweet taste, the same intoxicating constituents; until Bond pulled him back, hard, spun them both around, and it was Alec who stood with his back to the wall then, like old times _._

Bond surveyed him for a moment, all narrowed eyes and stiff lines of his shoulders, and Alec thought he might say something, but then he took Alec’s mouth again, instead, bit down on his lip so hard Alec tasted blood, and they got tangled up in each other all over again, hands searching for skin, pushing under fabric, opening belt buckles and slipping inside.

It was a bit of a power play, the dirty slide-and-squeeze of weapon-trained fingers in the properties of another man who could easily kill you, but Alec liked it, liked it almost too much. Bond’s teeth left a mark at the side of his neck when he came, and Alec retaliated with finger shaped indentations at Bond’s hip that would turn red and blue in the morning; and there was a moment, when they stood in between these old bones, just breathing, no boundaries, where Alec dared to look at Bond and Bond looked back, and it felt oddly peaceful between them, oddly like it should be.

“See you around then,” Bond said, when he’d gotten himself in order again; and it might have sounded blasé. To anyone but Alec.

“Maybe not on a cemetery, next time.”

“If I’d chosen the place it wouldn’t have been a cemetery to begin with,” Bond retorted, too little bite in it to be anything but teasing, already turning away.

“I’ll find you,” Alec said.

Bond looked around to him once more, and for the flicker of a second there was an almost-smile on his lips.

“No doubt.”

It sounded strangely like a promise.


End file.
